All photos courtesy of Universal City Studio, LLC, except photo of Richard

Lariviere, courtesy of the University of Oregon

Excerpts on pages 38 and 183 from The Real Animal House by Chris Miller. Used
by permission of the author.

Excerpt on pages 209–210 from a Huffington Post article by Sean Daniel. Used by
permission of the author.

Excerpt on pages 211–213 from AMCtv.com article by Christine Fall, copyright

© 2010–2011 American Movie Classics Company, LLC. All rights reserved.

Excerpt on pages 213–214 from “Old School” by Michael Simmons, as originally

published in LA Weekly. Used courtesy of the author.

fat, drunk, and stupid. Copyright © 2012 by Matty Simmons. All rights
reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St.
Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.stmartins.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Simmons, Matty.
Fat, drunk, and stupid : the inside story behind the making of
Animal house / Matty Simmons.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-312-55226-8 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4299-4235-5 (e-book)
1. Animal house (Motion picture) I. Title.
PN1997.A4255S57 2012
791.43—dc23
2011046556

First Edition: April 2012

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 1
the house is open

It was July 26, 1978, a hot and humid Friday night. I drove
down Park Avenue slowly—everyone and everything moved
slowly. The car in front of me seemed not to move at all. The
people in the streets didn’t walk with the usual New York over-
drive but with the tired tread of a weary and almost defeated
populace. It was summer in Manhattan and one of those
nights that you think of only as an excuse to go to the moun-
tains or the beach, or anywhere where you can breathe.
It seemed I was the only one on Park Avenue whose
adrenaline was pumping. I was a ner vous wreck and the crawl
of everything surrounding me aggravated me even more. I
turned left on 57th Street and drove slowly to the Sutton
Theatre, just east of Third Avenue. Now, the street was
crowded and people were moving briskly. I crossed over Third
and stared at the crowd in front of the theatre. The ticket
line stretched all the way to Second Avenue and beyond. It was

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 Matty Simmons

not unlike that at a rock concert, with hundreds of people—

primarily young, screaming, running, laughing, calling to
each other, and waiting on line. It was the line for the 6 p.m.
showing on opening day of National Lampoon’s Animal House.
A kid in his late teens ran by me and yelled to a friend,
“They’re sold out until the midnight show and we have to get
on line.” I looked at my watch. It was 5:50.
I remembered what Charlie Powell had told me. A week
earlier we had screened the movie at the American Book
Association convention in Atlanta. The place was jammed
with 10,000 people for the book fair and to see an advance
showing of this new fi lm. I was upset. The sound of the movie
was not recorded for an arena. Fifteen minutes into the fi lm
I got up and strode out into the lobby. I just stood there alone,
smoking, and trying to listen to the reactions from the audience.
Charlie then marketing head of Universal Studios, saw me and
came over. I told him I was disturbed because the sound was
so bad. He smiled and put a hand on my shoulder. “You’ve got
nothing to worry about, Matty,” he said. “I swear on my son’s
life that you have a major hit.” I’d never heard anyone take such
an oath, then I turned and saw that behind him was Buddy
Young, Universal’s public relations director. He’d heard what
Charlie said, laughed, and said, “ You’re in good shape, Matty.
Charlie loves his son very much.”
“A major hit,” he had said. And now I could see from the
lines at the Sutton theater that Charlie might be right.
At eight o’clock I drove to the Loews theater on 86th
Street. It was the same scene, lines around the block. Then I
moved across to Broadway to the Astor, where a few days

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 Fat, Drunk, and Stupid

before we’d held the world premiere of the film. There were at
least 2,000 people on lines around the block. Not stopping on
Broadway, I drove back to the Sutton and sat in my car until
the ten o’clock show. The lines were again snaking around 57th
Street to Third Avenue. As I looked around the crowd, I no-
ticed a familiar figure standing quietly watching. It was Walter
Garibaldi, the assistant to the treasurer of the National Lam-
poon, and in his hand was a small calculator, which he kept
tapping. I called out his name and he walked over to my car.
“What the hell are you doing?” I asked. He smiled and told me,
“I’m just figuring out how much money we make every time
somebody buys a ticket.” Later that evening, when I returned,
Walter was still there, three crushed coffee cups at his feet, still
tapping numbers into his little calculator.
In Chicago that night, Lampoon editor John Hughes sat
alone in a jammed movie theater watching the film. He’d stood
in line for a half hour or so to get in. When the picture ended,
he later told me, “I said to myself, I’m going to make movies.”
Universal executive Sean Daniel and the distribution
people were calling studio head Ned Tanen to give him num-
bers and tell him about the opening-day reaction to Animal
House.
At one point, Tanen called Universal chairman Lew Was-
serman and told him what was going on. Wasserman thought
about it for a moment and mused, “Funny how such a little
movie can turn out to be such a big movie.” A few years earlier,
the same thing had happened at Universal with the low-budget
American Graffiti, but it appeared that this was going to be even
bigger. And it was.

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 Matty Simmons

Tanen, Sid Sheinberg, president of MCA, Universal’s par-

ent company, and Wasserman phoned each other constantly
over the weekend, getting day-by-day box office reports and
congratulating each other.
Universal had agreed to have the world premiere in New
York City and asked me to run it. My staff and I were to handle
the invitations and to set up the premiere party. I gathered
everybody who worked on the business end of the Lampoon in
my office. We would invite, of course, key members of the cast
and crew, Universal officials, celebrities, the magazine’s ad-
vertisers, and the staff of 21st Century Communications, the
parent company of the Lampoon. My assistant, Barbara Atti,
would coordinate the event. From the start, I knew I wanted
to have the party at the Village Gate. Its two floors could house
2,000 guests and it had been the place where we kicked off
our first live show, National Lampoon’s Lemmings, in 1973. It
was this play that featured John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Chris-
topher Guest, and others.
Guests were asked to wear college garb: anything that
they might have worn, or thought about wearing, during their
days at college. Some came in togas, others in T-shirts or letter
sweaters, carry ing pennants from their alma maters. Belushi
wore the famous “COLLEGE” sweatshirt. There were girls
in cheerleader costumes and a couple of guys came in football
uniforms. Some came as Bluto look-alikes.
I wanted servers everywhere with trays of food, and I
wanted college-kid food: hot dogs, hamburgers, and snacks of
every kind. There would be no hard liquor, just kegs of beer.
Sixties rock bands would play wall-to-wall music. It was spec-

4
 Fat, Drunk, and Stupid

tacular, and I remember it all so well, even though it was one

of the few times in my life when I spent an evening in what
seemed to be a total daze.
The screening of the film that night started with a prob-
lem. The movie was supposed to begin at 7 p.m. By that time,
the Astor theater was jammed with 3,000 people. We had to
rent another theater some blocks north to screen the film for
the overflow crowd. The audience was getting restless at the
Astor. We were waiting because John Landis, the film’s direc-
tor, was late. At 7:25 he still hadn’t arrived and I told my as-
sistant to tell the projectionist to start. I was too restless to
sit and watch the movie, so, again, I stood out in the lobby.
At 7:30 Landis and costume designer Deborah Nadoolman,
whom he later married, came dashing in. He was furious that
the movie was already screening and began arguing with me
in the lobby. Both of us threatened to start throwing punches.
We were face to face when Universal execs Thom Mount and
Sean Daniel moved between us and separated us. Landis then
went into the theater and watched the rest of the film while
sitting on the steps of the balcony. His reserved seats had been
taken.
Down at the Village Gate on Bleecker Street, Barbara
Atti and her crew were set. Every entrance to the Gate was
guarded, not only by uniform police but by the senior class of
Columbia Prep, headed by my son Andy, a senior there at the
time. I had first done something like that at the after-party
for the opening of Lemmings when my older son Michael’s
Horace Mann senior class guarded the entrance, so that only
those with invitations would be allowed into Minetta Tavern

5
 Matty Simmons

on MacDougal Street. Now it was the Village Gate and we

expected ten times the crowd that had been invited to the Lem-
mings party. We invited 2,000 people; more than 5,000 showed
up, some with, more without, invitations. So there was a 3,000-
seat world premiere, a 1,000-seat theater in addition, and then
a 2,000-plus party. Thousands of people contacted us to get an
invitation to the premiere and the party. Crashers were stopped
by the guards, who looked like a small army surrounding the
Pentagon. Warner Bros.’ chief Steve Ross came by. Ross put a
hand on my shoulder. “I guess,” he said, “we should have made
the movie at Warner.” (Steve, in the course of his career, had
gone from Riverside Funeral Home in New York, to Kinney
Parking, merged it with Independent News Company, and
then acquired Warner Bros. His company would eventually
merge with Time, Inc., creating Time Warner.)
The music at the party was nonstop. Groups like Joey
Dee and the Starliters played sixties classics. At one point, the
Michael Simmons Band played Stephen Bishop’s theme song
from Animal House and members of the cast jumped on stage
and led the singing. As they sang, John Belushi leaped off the
stage, raced to the back of the club, grabbed me, and partly
pulled, partly carried me, onto the stage and I joined them.

Sean Daniel remembers the studio’s response to the reaction

to Animal House at the premiere screening and party. “I phoned
Ned and he said to me—you know Ned had that dark, gloomy
humor about him—‘I know it’s about to open, I know you’ve
had good previews, but I still think you gotta choose which
building you should jump off, the Chrysler or the Empire State

6
 Fat, Drunk, and Stupid

Building, you still got time to make that choice.’ I said, ‘Ned,
we’ve been through so much, it’s working! It’s gonna work.’
There was a part of Ned that was a rebel. Much of this movie
appealed to him as a way of sticking it to the rest of the people
because he always wanted to remind them how straight and
uptight they were.”
National Lampoon’s Animal House became the number-
one picture in America for eight weeks. It slid to second for
two weeks, because of the prebooked Christmas movies and,
remarkably, was brought back in February and became num-
ber one again. No other movie in recent motion picture history
has ever had such a run. It became more than a movie. Animal
House changed comedy, and attitudes, particularly among col-
lege audiences, where the movie became a prototype among
young people.
Perhaps Roger Ebert described best the reaction to the
film on college campuses in his Chicago Sun-Times article.

In the days and weeks and months and years that

followed, life on college campuses had changed. Tim
Matheson, as Otter, had said, “We can do anything
we want, we’re college students!” The words were taken
literally, things changed. Whereas in the late ’60s and
early ’70s college students stopped being “wild and
crazy” and spent more time fighting against or for the
war in Vietnam, they would now let loose and the trig-
ger was National Lampoon’s Animal House.